


A Thousand Years On

by TempleCloud



Series: The Adventures of Twigleg [4]
Category: Drachenreiter | Dragon Rider - Cornelia Funke, Sector General - James White
Genre: Crossover, Death, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:49:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27670934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: What if Twigleg doesn't die when Ben does?
Relationships: Ben & Fliegenbein | Twigleg (Drachenreiter), Original Character/Original Character
Series: The Adventures of Twigleg [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772449
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PDB11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PDB11/gifts).
  * Inspired by [One wild ride](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383087) by [Evilkat23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilkat23/pseuds/Evilkat23). 
  * Inspired by [The Other Homunculus](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/717904) by Avrel the Teller. 



It’s hard to believe I’ve lived this long. I remember calculating once that, if all went well, Ben and I probably had perhaps sixty or seventy years to live. If all didn’t go well – which seemed much more likely, considering how many near-misses we had had lately with griffins, elephant-lizards, volcanoes, and so on – we would probably get killed much sooner. It’s strange to think that nearly everyone I knew then is now dead – except for Mizell, who I’d thought was dead, and Atticus and his family, who are undead. Even [Atticus](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11292824/1/Out-of-the-frying-pan) looks older now – like a human of around thirty, I suppose. He certainly couldn’t get away with hanging around a comprehensive school posing as a Year Thirteen these days.

As it turned out, Ben and I had seventy-two years together, most of it working in at Mimameiđr, the reserve for endangered fantastic beings that Ben’s parents had founded. In the many years we had worked in crypto-conservation, we had helped many species back from the brink of extinction, including pegasi and krakens, and even unicorns, who we had thought were already extinct. We had had all kinds of what Ben thought of as adventures and I thought of as trouble. We had seen seawater-powered aeroplanes become the most popular form of transport of the twenty-first century (with only a fraction of the pilots even guessing that their inventor was a troll). We had [found my brother Mizell](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4522554/1/The-Other-Homunculus). I had helped to bring up three generations of Greenbloom children, as well as [Atticus’s adopted children](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11689657/1/One-wild-ride), who by now all looked thirteen, regardless of what ages they had been to start with. Vampires don’t age quickly once they hit puberty, which is why there are so many more teen vampire romances than books about vampire toddlers. Atticus was going to have a house full of teenagers for a long time.

By now, Ben was becoming very deaf and could barely walk. What remained of his hair had gone from being as black as a raven to as silver as a dragon. He could no longer remember what had happened a few minutes ago, but he always remembered who everyone was, and the adventures we had had years before.

I tried to talk to Mizell about what was happening: about the likelihood that I would die, too, when Ben did. I had been horrified the first time I read it, but the first time we had actually seen this happen to a friend of ours, a female homunculus called [Rosa Pinkhair](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12483183/1/It-s-never-easy), it just seemed natural. Rosa had such a close link to her creator, Esmeralda, that she could feel when Esmeralda was ill or injured, even if they were many miles apart at the time. But then, Rosa had been actually made from Esmeralda’s sperm (since Esmeralda identified as a woman but was biologically male), rather than by transfiguring insects, as Mizell and I had been created, or implanting an animal’s heart into a clay doll, like our friend Mouse. Rosa’s bond with Esmeralda was inborn and involuntary; my relationship with Ben was something that I had chosen.

I knew Mizell thought I was insane to fall in love with so short-lived a creature as a human, and to become mortal for the sake of one, but I wanted to explain why it had been worth it. I wanted to tell him that my friendship with Ben had helped me become a person again, when I had turned into a creature almost as despicable as Nettlebrand himself: a thing programmed to serve, just as Nettlebrand was a thing programmed to kill. I wanted to apologise to Mizell for the way that, when we’d finally found each other again after hundreds of years apart, I was going to leave him.

But whenever I tried to talk about it, Mizell would just shrug and say, ‘It’s your decision,’ and change the subject. So I tried to work things out on my own. If Ben and I died at the same time, would that mean we would be together in whatever happened after death? Did homunculi even have souls? One book I had read seemed to suggest jokingly that we did, and should be baptised, but it turned out that the author wasn’t using the word ‘homunculus’ to mean artificial humanoids like us, but embryos, or even sperm. He was responding to the Catholic Church’s giving permission to baptise babies before they were born, in case they didn’t survive birth, by saying that in that case, they might as well play safe and baptise a man’s gonads before he has ever had sex, to make sure that his sperm go to heaven. It was a funny book, but not exactly helpful.

At any rate, one evening when I had finished updating a report on phoenix incubation, I came in to climb up to the wooden house Hothbrodd the troll had carved for me, standing as it always did on Ben’s bedside table. Ben seemed to be already asleep, so I decided not to disturb him by climbing onto the stack of pillows that propped him up and waking him up to say goodnight to him. At least he wasn’t struggling for breath tonight. Then I realised that the thing on the bed was no longer Ben. It was as still and cold as a wax statue. I climbed up the sheets to burrow my face into the pile of pillows next to my friend, and wait to die.

When I looked up, we were in a desert somewhere, under a black sky. I couldn’t see any moon or stars, but somehow our shadows stretched out, long and black, on the silver sand beneath our feet. Ben, who was walking a short way ahead of me, seemed to be a young boy again, the way he had been when we first met. I was human-sized, [the way I briefly had been once as a result of a spell](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11292824/1/Out-of-the-frying-pan), except that this time it didn’t feel strange or confusing. Here, it just seemed normal.

Ben caught sight of a long-nosed, wild-haired shadow, and turned, saying ‘Barn – Twigleg? What are _you_ doing here?’

‘We’re dead,’ I said.

‘I know. I meant, why? I knew I was dying, but I didn’t think you were even ill! I was wondering whether I’d see Barnabas and Vita again, or Slatebeard, or if I’d even meet my biological parents. They died when I was three, and I don’t really remember them. Did –did something terrible happen to you?’

I realised that I had never actually explained to Ben before that loving him meant I had to die when he did. When I had transcribed the information about homunculi from Barnabas’s notebooks and the collection of old bestiaries onto the database on fantastic beings, I had left out that detail, because I didn’t want Ben to read it and worry. 

I didn’t know how to talk about it now, and have to explain why I had never mentioned it before. This was the most awkward conversation we had had since one night when Ben was fourteen, when he didn’t want to talk about missing Firedrake so much that he was planning to leave the Greenblooms and go and live with the dragons, and I didn’t want to talk about missing my brothers so much that I had tried to persuade Ben’s science teacher to create a homunculus so that I wouldn’t be the only one.

At least then, I had been sure that, wherever Ben went, I would go with him. But later, when we’d gone back to visit the castle where I was created, and we’d found another derelict castle where Mizell was now living, Mizell and I had promised each other that we’d be together till the end. And now I was in the middle of breaking that promise.

‘I think I’m just meant to be with you – unless you want me to go on living?’ I added.

Ben considered. ‘I want you to be you,’ he said at last. ‘Whatever you do, it’s got to be your decision.’

I remembered Mizell saying the same thing. I realised that he hadn’t been avoiding the subject because it made him uncomfortable, but because he was trying to give me a free choice. If I had been Mizell, I would have been crying, pleading with me to stay. But he’d just – stood back to let me decide. I felt ashamed.

The trouble was that, with people on both sides trying not to put pressure on me, I wasn’t sure what I actually did want – other than everyone I loved to be alive and well and young again and in the same place.

‘Uh – are you planning to reincarnate again?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I might, if there’s something I need to do. Only – it won’t necessarily be anywhere soon in your timeline, or even on Earth. For all I know, next time I’m going to be born, a thousand years in the future, to make peace between the Druul and the Trolanni.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

So, even if Ben did reincarnate, we probably wouldn’t see each other again. Then again, even if he reincarnated next year in my world, that was no reason why he should remember me or Firedrake, or anything of his past life. Some people believed that Ben was the reincarnation of the first Dragon Rider, Zenith, but Atticus, who had dearly loved Zenith and been driven nearly mad with grief at his death, had never even asked about it. He just concentrated on being a good friend to Ben as Ben, without needing him to be a reincarnation of his lost friend.

Later, Ben had been kidnapped by a vampire clone of Zenith who had been our enemy at first, but later became someone who seemed virtually indistinguishable from the original Zenith. [Clone-Zenith and Atticus](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12264229/9/Into-the-fire) had lived together and brought up their adopted children together, and the clone seemed to think of himself as _being_ Zenith. Perhaps he really was the long-awaited reincarnation of the Dragon-Rider, and the fact that other humans, like Ben and his friends Winston and Ivan, were also dragon-riders was to do with something different.

As I wondered about all this, a black-robed figure strode up to us across the sand, on long bony legs.

HAVE YOU MADE YOUR MINDS UP YET? he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘I’m going on.’

‘And I’m going back,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said Ben. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’ I said, and we hugged for a long, long time, and then turned and walked off in opposite directions.

When I woke, Mizell was crouched on the pillow next to me, and Atticus was sitting in a chair next to the bed. Mizell jumped back, startled, when he felt me moving.

‘You – came back?’ he said, baffled.

‘We promised – together till the end,’ I said.

‘But – you gave yourself to a human.’

‘Yes. And he gave me to myself. You see – I didn’t have the spirit to run away, the way you did. I was created to be a slave, just as Nettlebrand was created to be a killer. I saw that as the whole reason for my existence. So the only way I could explain to myself why I was rebelling against Nettlebrand, was to tell myself I had decided I wanted Ben to be my master instead. He loved me so much that I came to love him, and then – ultimately, he loved me so much that I came to love myself, too, because I could see the person that I was in his eyes, and so he enabled me to be a better person than I ever thought I could. He gave me to myself – and he gave me to Mizell, too.’ 

Thinking back, it was only when we met Mizell that I finally started calling Ben ‘Ben’ instead of ‘Master’, and ‘du’ instead of ‘Ihr’ when we were speaking in German. He’d tried to tell me not to call him ‘Master’ when we were first together, and then stopped arguing about it when he realised that nagging me about it just made me feel uncomfortable. But I’d just needed longer to accept that a homunculus and a human could be friends on equal terms.

I was crying, now, but not sobbing with despair the way I would have once. If anything, I was crying with gratitude at having been allowed to know Ben. And Mizell, who was usually so tough and self-contained, was crying too, with relief at having me back.

Atticus leaned towards me. ‘You’re b-braver than I was,’ he said shakily. ‘I didn’t know if you could be. I’m – I’m sorry I misjudged you.’

I wondered what he was talking about, and then I remembered. Decades ago, Atticus had suggested that if I didn’t have a self-destruct mechanism to ensure that I died when Ben did, I might be so distraught with grief at his death that I would do something I would regret. The way Atticus had when his Dragon Rider, Zenith, had died. 

And now, Ben’s death had brought back the shock of Zenith’s death all over again, and Atticus seemed to go back to being the frightened, lonely, fourteen-year-old vampire boy he had been then, sobbing with grief over Zenith’s death, and sorrow over the terrible mistakes he had made. Even though Zenith had somehow come back to him in the end, it didn’t wipe away his feelings of guilt. I wished I was human-sized so that I could hug Atticus. Instead, I climbed off the bed onto his knee and hugged his icy-cold hand.

‘You didn’t misjudge me,’ I said. ‘If Ben had died then, when he was sixteen, I wouldn’t have coped. Or – if I had, it would have been because of you and Barnabas and everyone, and because – well, because I _wasn’t_ alone in the world the way you were. But I’m not the same person I was when Ben was sixteen, and you’re not the same person you were when Zenith died.’

It was tempting to regress to being the person I had been back then: someone who would have retreated into myself, and wished there was someone to come and rescue me from my dark mood, the way Ben always used to. But I didn’t need to, now. Ben had been my first friend, apart from my brothers, but he was no longer my only friend. Life was going to be sadder and lonelier, but it hadn’t become meaningless because he had died.

And there was something else I realised I needed to say, quite urgently. Apart from people who have been infected with vampirism by being bitten, or who have one or more vampire parents, the people with the highest increased risk of becoming vampires when they die are people with red hair, and people who have committed suicide. I certainly qualified on the first count, and allowing myself to love a human when I knew that this could kill me arguably counted as suicide.

‘Atticus,’ I said, ‘can you keep an eye on me for the next few days? If I try to bite Mizell, promise you’ll stop me.’


	2. Chapter 2

As it turned out, I hadn’t turned into a vampire, but having good vampire friends like Atticus would have helped me stay on track if I had. In the centuries that followed, all of us at Mimameiđr – homunculi, vampires, humans, pegasi, trolls and many more – worked together to protect fabulous beings around the world. We kept an eye on the behaviour of the human world, as humans became slightly more interested in conservation, and much more interested in exploring space. Once they had made a few attempts at colonising the moon and Mars, they apparently noticed that the biggest problem they had, bigger than surviving on a rock with no air to breathe, no water to drink, and temperatures that go from very hot to very cold every fortnight, was that humans just weren’t very good at getting on with each other.

On Earth, that hadn’t been a problem, because a human who didn’t get on with his neighbours could just say, ‘Huh, I don’t want you, I’m going to live in a log cabin in the forest.’ If he didn’t know how to build a log cabin, he could just say, ‘Huh, I’m going to stay in my flat and buy everything over the internet and never talk to anyone face-to-face.’ But for people who were going to planets where there wasn’t any forest or any supermarkets that did drone deliveries, knowing how to work together in a small community where you can’t get away from your neighbours was vital.

And so the Space Peace Corps was founded. People who wanted to join space colonies had to apply as groups, not as individuals. First, they had to spend at least three years as a group of twelve, being self-sufficient farmers in a dome in the desert, growing enough plants to meet their oxygen needs, and recycling water and every kind of waste. (We heard a lot about these domes from displaced sphinxes, and also discovered that the little colony of griffins in Indonesia were not the only griffins left in the world, but that’s another story.) The Space Peace Corps was an international project, where no more than two people were allowed to come from the same country. 

After the groups of twelve had survived three years together, then, if they still liked each other enough to want to go into space together, they could apply to do so. If, on the other hand, they wanted to stay on Earth, they could join a larger domed community of up to a thousand people, in which they were allowed to date, get married, and (with permission from the group) have children. Many of the people who grew up to join Martian colonies, or travelled off on generation-ships, were the children of the desert colonies on Earth.

Then, for the first time, humans discovered intelligent life on another planet – beings technologically advanced enough to be capable of obliterating life on Earth. You almost certainly know all about it. Most schools on most planets teach the story, but all schools on Earth and Orligia, and on all Earth-colonised or Oligian-colonised worlds, are compelled by law to teach the terrifying history of the Earth-Orligian War, followed, to everyone’s amazement, by the Earth-Orligian Truce, the Earth-Orligian Embarrassed Apology, and the Great Galactic Let’s Make Sure This Never Happens Again.

You’ve probably seen reproductions of the famous war memorial with its figures of the hideously wounded bodies of the human MacEwan and the Orligian Grawlya-Ki, the two soldiers who, as a last resort when they were pretty sure they were going to die anyway, actually tried talking to each other. You know how they discovered that the whole war had been the result of a misunderstanding, with each side believing that the other had launched an unprovoked attack on it. 

But unless you come from a much longer-lived species than a human, you haven’t seen the original statue, because it no longer exists. It stood for two hundred and thirty-six years: the bodies of the two enemies who had become friends, frozen in stasis. When I saw a photograph on the news, it reminded me – irreverently, and irrelevantly – of the smuggler in Lola’s favourite film who gets frozen into a statue and displayed in somebody’s mansion, until his friends come to rescue him. But these two were waiting for medical rescue. At that time, humans didn’t have the technology to treat a man who had had most of his internal organs blown out the way MacEwan had. And Grawlya-Ki, who might have survived (and who actually did look rather like a Wookiee, as it happens), asked to be frozen alongside his new friend, so that they could recover together.

Atticus and I watched the reports together, and I wondered whether I would have made the same decision as Grawlya-Ki, if I’d had friends, family and a career back on my home planet, to give it up for a friend I’d only just met. I can’t tell, but I think he was right. Atticus only said, ‘I wish we’d had stasis fields when Zenith got sick. Do you think the Orligians would mind teaching us how they work?’

If you’re wondering why we bother to fit out modern ambulance ships with the potential to provide habitable environments for any species while they’re receiving emergency treatment, instead of just putting everyone in stasis until they can get to hospital, the answer is that it’s too dangerous. If anything scratches the surface of a time-frozen object, it explodes, killing the patient and any neighbouring patients and all the rescue workers unlucky enough to be standing nearby, and demolishing the ambulance ship.

In the centuries that followed, Earth was cautiously allowed to join the Galactic Federation, on the grounds that Earth-humans at least seemed willing to work towards becoming a civilised species. Carefully-selected human diplomats were allowed to be introduced to representatives from other worlds, such as Nidia, Kelgia, Melf, Traltha, and even Illensa.

At first, those of us who had lived in a multi-species society for generations laughed when we saw supposedly ground-breaking footage of, we were assured, the first humans to meet intelligent non-humans in a peaceful setting. Then, some of us – particularly the humans themselves – began to wonder: if the fellow members of their species could cope with the existence of intelligent humanoids from Orligia and Nidia, did this mean they were ready to be told about brownies and trolls? If they could manage to be tolerably sociable to the spiny, chlorine-breathing Illensans, or the huge, heavily-armoured Hudlars, perhaps they could even cope with learning that dragons and krakens really existed. At a stretch, they might even grant rights to creatures they had known existed all along, but didn’t want to admit were sapient, such as their fellow apes, and whales and parrots. It might be a little harder to persuade humans to tolerate vampires – but, as those humans who didn’t want to become vegetarian were mostly eating vat-grown meat by then, they didn’t really have any logical reason to object to vampires who drank vat-grown blood.

It took a long time, but we had a lot of allies already in place: scientists who had been doing conventional conservation work but also secretly working with fabulous beings. If just one respected marine biologist admitted that she had been researching not only whales but also mer-people, she would have been laughed off as a crank, but when lots of them did, they were hard to ignore. At the same time, forward-thinking griffins like Shrii had to persuade their fellow griffins that, if humans were willing to reform, and if powerful, intelligent beings around the galaxy had managed to avoid war for centuries, then griffins should, too.

Of course, this led to all sorts of other problems: for example, if humans accepted that cetaceans were people, they expected cetaceans to respect each other as people, and put an end to cetacean-on-cetacean crimes like porpoise-bashing. The bottlenose dolphins responded with a report comparing the numbers of porpoises murdered annually by dolphin gangs with the numbers caught in fishing-nets, running into accidents as a result of noise pollution, hit by ships, or poisoned by agricultural or industrial chemicals running off into waterways. Eventually, the various cetacean species agreed that, while they didn’t believe that humans had any moral authority over anything, they were willing to accept mer-people as arbitrators.

By the time MacEwan woke up, Earth had become a very different world. Fortunately, he was intelligent enough to expect change, and therefore didn’t panic when his wounds were treated, not by a human surgeon implanting cloned organs, but by a gigantic silver dragon breathing healing blue flames over him.

So – by this time, Mimameiđr and the other sanctuaries for fabulous beings around the world were no longer secret, hidden refuges. They were more like villages with a higher than usual level of species diversity, nice places to grow up in, but, ultimately, somewhere quite a lot of adolescents wanted to leave so that they could explore the world, or even the universe. Two of Atticus’s children, Lucy and Jason, applied to work on space stations. There were lots of other vampires there, their emails home said – both half-bloods like them who just found daylight uncomfortable, and full vampires for whom it was deadly. If they felt claustrophobic, they could go to a window and look out at a beautiful night sky at any time they liked.

If you’re wondering whether dragons are likely to develop a spacefaring culture, they’re working on it. The main problem is that, while dragons don’t usually need to eat, they do need moonlight, and they prefer it to be light reflected off a moon onto a planet. Those who have tried visiting Earth’s moon, and seeing whether earthlight could sustain them, complained that while they could live on it, it made them feel ill and dizzy. There are planets that have plenty of moons, such as Jupiter, but there don’t seem to be many that are suitable in other ways (for example, providing a breathable atmosphere which is also thick enough to fly in and clear enough to see the moon, and a solid surface for dragons who want to land).

As we weren’t as busy with rescue work, I had more time to study, particularly languages and computers, and computers’ ability to learn languages and translate. Most of the research in the past, as it had been done by humans, concentrated on translating between one human language and another. I wanted to create programs that, given a few minutes of an unfamiliar language of whale-song, could translate between it and Mandarin Chinese.

Mizell, meanwhile, had officially qualified as both a doctor and a veterinary surgeon. Back in the days of hiding, the human veterinarians who visited us to treat injured creatures (at least those, like unicorns and cloudhounds, who bore some resemblance to ordinary animals) had needed an assistant who was small enough to deal with fiddly jobs, and fortunately Mizell isn’t as squeamish as I am.

Across the galaxy, people from different planets were admiring each other from a distance, but, considering that a misunderstanding had led to the first galactic war, they were all being distantly polite and careful not to tread on each other’s tentacles. Periodically there were opinion pieces from MacEwan and Grawlya-Ki published in the newspapers, urging people of the galaxy to learn to work together and make friends to the extent that they can tease each other without ceasing to be friends. It didn’t sound so unreasonable to me, thinking of the way that Sorrel and I constantly bickered with each other, and remembering learning to sleep through the sound of Lola and Hothbrodd yelling at each other in order to keep themselves awake on long flights. But most humans who read the reports snorted and said, ‘But the world’s moved on – what a pair of dinosaurs!’ and then clapped their hands to their mouths in apology at having said something that could be interpreted as dracophobic.

And then, one day, there was the headline ‘War Veterans Swing Into Action!’ Grawlya-Ki and MacEwan had given emergency medical treatment to assorted injured aliens in an accident, while keeping separated those whose atmospheres were toxic to each other. Everyone was delighted with them, but they themselves were pointing out that they wouldn’t have had to pitch in as well-meaning amateurs if medics had proper multi-species training, and if species weren’t so coy about learning anything about each other’s physiology in general. They were proposing that the best way to promote galactic harmony by teaching different species to work together was to build a multi-species hospital in space.

I read the article and thought, ‘Hmmm – how often are people likely to become ill or injured in situations where it’s more convenient to take them to a space hospital than to find a doctor from their home planet?’ But when I showed the article to Mizell, he read it with more excitement than I’d seen him show about anything.

‘I want to work there!’ he said.

‘What? Why?’

‘Because I’d be good at it. I’m a qualified surgeon, I can get into smaller places than a human, and I’ve been working in a multi-species organisation for centuries longer than most humans knew there _were_ other sapient life-forms. When I started, it was exciting to have so much to learn. When I’d settled in, I was content. But now – I’m getting bored. I need a challenge.’

‘So do I,’ I said. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I had gone through the same path from excitement (not to mention sheer terror at times), through contentment, to boredom. I’d been spending a lot of my time doing research into machine learning. So far, no civilisation in the galaxy seemed to have been able to make machines that were conscious and self-aware (that seems to require either nature or magic), but it _was_ interesting creating algorithms that could identify subtle patterns in languages, and find parallels not just between human languages, but the languages of different species. It helped that I had been a linguist long before I had been a computer programmer.

‘They’re going to need translators,’ I said. ‘Most of the ones they’ve got in spaceports and hotels and so on are only programmed with basic vocabulary, not the specialised medical terminology they’ll need if doctors of different species are going to be working together. And we keep encountering new aliens with previously unknown languages. I’m going to apply for a job on the translation computers.’

We started work at the same time, long before Sector General opened. I was busy making sure the translation computers could make building instructions comprehensible to the mixed-species construction crews, and Mizell was one of the team on standby in case anyone was injured on the building site.

We’ve been there ever since. I’d like to be able to do more to refine the translation computers – to enable them to recognise and convey tone of voice, sarcasm, and common idioms. Particularly with species whose communication is mostly conveyed through body-language, such as Kelgians, I wish I had time to program the computers to identify the fur-rippling patterns for joking, confused, annoyed, straightforwardly practical, flirtatious, etc, and reproduce these in intonation for species whose language is sound-based. But with the constant flow of new species coming in, I’m busy enough keeping up with the basics.

We’ve had a report this week of two newly discovered species. One group were the spider-like Crextic, natives of a planet that the ambulance ship _Rhabwar_ had landed on, beings who haven’t learned to work metal but use their own silk to build ships and even light aircraft. (One of the human staff found a cartoon from centuries back about [spiders on a glider](https://irregularwebcomic.net/1751.html), and there are now copies of it stuck on walls all over the ship.)

The other species are a couple who had been fleeing from their home planet, Trolann, searching for a safe world on which their species could settle, just as Firedrake and Sorrel had set out all those centuries ago in search of a safe home for dragons. The explorers, Jasam and Keet, had been sent by their species to look for a world out of reach of the Druul, hideous monsters who had poisoned their home world to the point where it was uninhabitable. Understandably, they were horrified, when they were injured and trapped in a wrecked ship on a strange planet, to be approached by creatures who looked very similar to the Druul but even bigger and more formidable – otherwise known as Earth-humans.

Both the Trolanni and the Crextic took some time to accept that the humans really were offering them medical help for benevolent reasons, and honestly hadn’t come there to eat them. Now, however, the Crextic have invited the whole of the Trolanni race to join them on their planet, and plans are underway to evacuate them. The only thing the Galactic Federation is still arguing about is what to do about the Druul.

The Trolanni don’t believe that the Druul are anything more than monsters which should be exterminated, and many people in the Federation, even if they don’t agree with making them extinct, are inclined to agree that Druul can’t be sapient. How could rational creatures be so malign, they ask? Stupid enough to carry on a war with a rival species that makes their planet uninhabitable for both? Could the remote ancestors of humans ever have been like that?

Yes, of course they were, even if modern humans don’t remember it. I remember when humans were the monsters that even dragons and vampires feared. And I remember a human who was the best and kindest friend I have ever known.

A group of first contact specialists is setting out to observe Trolann to try to learn more about the Druul, to decide whether it’s worth trying to contact and attempt to educate them, or whether we should simply designate the planet as a nature reserve for them until they either reach civilisation or go extinct. I’ve volunteered to go along as a communications consultant.

After all, there’s always the chance of meeting an old friend.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was first suggested by [PDB11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PDB11), who suggested that, if Twigleg outlived Ben, his skill with both languages and computers would make him the ideal person to program the translation computer at Sector General.
> 
> The story of Twigleg's reunion with his brother Mizell is told in The Other Homunculus, by Avrel the Teller.
> 
> Atticus is introduced in Evilkat23's story Out Of The Frying Pan, and the story of how he came to adopt a group of vampire children is told in the sequel, One Wild Ride, both of which are published on Archive Of Our Own. The rest of Evilkat23's stories about Ben's friendships with Evilkat's OCs Ivan and Atticus are told in stories published on Fanfiction.net, which have not yet been posted on AOOO. So I've included links to the Fanfiction versions of these stories instead, so that you can look at all Evilkat's Drachenreiter fanfics. Evilkat has actually written a lot of stories inspired by Drachenreiter, but the sequence I am referring to runs in this order:
> 
> Out Of The Frying Pan  
> One Wild Ride  
> Let Me Talk  
> Into The Fire  
> It's Never Easy
> 
> I haven't used the same chronology as Evilkat; in my version, Ben meets both Ivan and Atticus when he is twelve, shortly after the events of the first Dragon Rider book, and under different circumstances from those Evilkat uses; also, Evilkat gives Ben a biological father who is still alive, whereas I have decided to keep him an orphan. But, since I'm borrowing Evilkat's characters, think of my version as an AU of those (while still trying to be compliant with the canonical Drachenreiter novels).


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